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Monday, November 26, 2007

Nothing says more about the unbridled rapacity of contemporary business practice than the sub-prime, mortgage lending scam. The world over, banking houses leapt into the breech to get their own piece of soft candy to stick in their teeth; such is the nature of banking and it doesn’t matter where you go... eeeeeezzzzzzy money... or so it often seems. It’s the same kind of pig in the headlights of the buffet table thing that has parted many a sucker from the gold in their pockets.

At Wharton and Harvard and all the other places where they teach you to steal according to the manipulated laws of the time, adjusted to the capacity to snatch and grab according to the needs of those who pay the people who make the laws in order to so on and so on ad vomitus; you get the picture... the idea is to make the most money with the least risk while cutting back on service and quality just short of the point where actual flesh is being cut off of the client and that’s okay too if the screaming doesn’t bring too much heat. You may think I’m being overly cynical but in fact I am being too kind. One thing further is the hammered in point to screw the competition whenever and wherever possible. It’s a hard world baby... the weak are killed and eaten. Word up.

There isn’t any question that the mortgage houses and banks and all of the other reptiles in suits knew what was involved in giving these loans to those who couldn’t actually ever pay them off unless every one of them won the lottery or a rich relative died. They knew going in that the whole thing was dodgy. “Yeah, baby... you just pay the interest and two three years from now you’ll be fat and the property will have increased in value and you can leverage this and then leverage that and everybody including the junkies on the street are going to ‘get well’”. Gee, too bad the other factors didn’t play along.

This is the climate that got ushered in with the clown prince of incompetence, George ‘turtle on a fencepost’ Bush as a Reagan redux. This is what shoehorned the media into a few grasping hands and back-doored the all too willing and lubricated up the Michael Powell FCC; panting and gasping for penetration... even though the actual thrusting violation went direct to the American people. Of course, with the media under control, you can then spin anything and when the shit begins to stink you point at somebody else and the media will duly report them as responsible.

Now you hear about banks all over the world having to swallow billions in losses but you should know that the banks are never the ones to lose; just like with that other Bush scam the S&L debacle that took place under the stewardship of that great American hero Ronald ‘McDonald’ Reagan.

You don’t need a Federal Reserve. You never needed a Federal Reserve and there is no ‘federal’ in Federal Reserve. The private banks that run your life under the false innuendo- implying name of the “I can’t believe it isn’t butter.” -Federal Reserve needed the Federal Reserve so that they could be the world’s biggest counterfeiters. I love the idea of printing your own money out of thin air whenever you like and then lending out this ghost money at interest and then just collecting money and what? Maybe you lend that out too? Gee, sooner or later you’re talking about ‘real money’.

This post isn’t the place for getting into the details of this CRIME. I don’t have the time or space... this is just a badly drawn boy; sort of a shadow of Sasquatch disappearing into the tree line; grainy photo kind of thing with huge footprints in the snow.

Basically what it comes down to is that some gangsters got together and used money that they printed on their own and then handed it out to their captains and capos to ‘put on the street’ and then everybody who ever wanted a house could go live in one for a little while until they came out of it worse than they went into it- sans house- and then with a little doe-see-doe here and a little doe-see-doe there, some somebodys wound up with a lot more than they started out with, while giving the impression of losing a whole lot but then that get paid off by the public via government fiat with a little more doe-see-doe here and a little more doe-see-doe there. The usual people got screwed and the usual people got richer than they were before.

GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED is good. Nobody is going to do anything. How long will the ship stay on the water? This is what impresses me; the magic of duct tape and bailing wire and bullshit... jury-rigging as art.

Make the most money with the least expense. Operate without a conscience. Steal, lie and cheat; kill if you have to and plant the knife in another man’s hand. This is what they teach you. This is what it takes. Then they slip out of town while a few ignorant front men go to jail.

How do you go after these people? They own the people who make the laws. They own the people who give the army and the police their marching orders and as long as the mouth-breathing thugs are willing to march, it will go on. It’s better to be swinging a lath or a club than to be the one getting clubbed. It is better to be the one closing the cell door than to be the one on the other side of the door. It is safer to do what you are told and feed your family than to oppose the crime boss and have your family starve.

I’m not telling you anything new. There’s always been some version of this at work. There’s always been the cosmetic job of making the villains into air-brushed heroes and then killing and slandering the real heroes. As long as people are content to go along and as long as enough of them are stupid and uniformed you can go right on doing as you please.

At Wharton and Harvard they have these phony ethics classes. The professors snicker... the students snicker... nudge, nudge, wink, wink.... and “Bob’s your uncle.” “Hey sport, how’s it going?” As long as they’ve been balling Charity they’ve been having charity balls and charity is an industry all of its own. As long as they’ve been merchandizing disease as a product they’ve been filling the shelves with placebos and sick-making drugs to combat it. The people who make the food and drink that destroys your health are the same people who run the hospitals and insurance agencies and health carriers (‘health carriers’...laughter) that feed off the guaranteed, life-style assured pathologies; ...at one end... at the other end... and at every point along the way.

So you think this housing crisis and the falling dollar and all the scary faces popping into the window was just an accident? Did someone miscalculate? Wanna buy a bridge? Gee, maybe they’ll explain it on the news...

Banks don’t really lose money. The dollar falls for the same reason the dollar rises. People make money from it at either end. The only people who ever lose is you, John Q.
Your candidates are promising you solutions while their backers and handlers are getting ready for the next wave of assaults against you. You are the food.

It’s possible to have an ethical system. Some countries in Europe and elsewhere do strive to maintain the system so that people at all ends can manage. Nothing works perfectly but certainly they work better in some places and those are the places that take the needs of everyone into consideration. There will always be crime and vice and terrorism. These are things you manage. These are things that you keep in their section of town or control as you go. Most people want to get along and most people are honest if they are allowed to be. This is what you count on and it works when you make it possible.

But when the people at the top are all thieves it means you live in a crime zone 24/7 and... it’s the law pilgrim. It’s what you get, without exception, in those systems where you get it without exception... sooner or later because that’s how it works.

These are some things that are worth thinking about BEFORE you have to worry about them; before they steal everything that isn’t nailed down and then come back with crowbars for the rest.

Protecting the big banks and letting them run amuck is what got the US in this spot to begin with.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, caused mostly by banks investing in questionable schemes to inflate their investments, the Great Depression descended upon America.

In 1933, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act, which following the Great Crash of 1929, one of every five banks in America fails. Many people, especially politicians, see market speculation engaged in by banks during the 1920s as a cause of the crash.

In 1933, Senator Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Congressman Henry Steagall (D-Ala.) introduce the historic legislation that bears their name, seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage).

Thru the years, the banks chaffed at regulations that forced them to stay out of the speculation business and tried repeatedly to get Glass-Steagall repealed.

In the spring of 1987, the Federal Reserve Board votes 3-2 in favor of easing regulations under Glass-Steagall Act, overriding the opposition of Chairman Paul Volcker. The vote comes after the Fed Board hears proposals from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust advocating the loosening of Glass-Steagall restrictions to allow banks to handle several underwriting businesses, including commercial paper, municipal revenue bonds, and mortgage-backed securities.

In January 1989, the Fed Board approves an application by J.P. Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Bankers Trust, and Citicorp to expand the Glass-Steagall loophole to include dealing in debt and equity securities in addition to municipal securities and commercial paper. This marks a large expansion of the activities considered permissible under Section 20, because the revenue limit for underwriting business is still at 5 percent. Later in 1989, the Board issues an order raising the limit to 10 percent of revenues, referring to the April 1987 order for its rationale.

In 1990, J.P. Morgan becomes the first bank to receive permission from the Federal Reserve to underwrite securities, so long as its underwriting business does not exceed the 10 percent limit.

In December 1996, with the support of Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board issues a precedent-shattering decision permitting bank holding companies to own investment bank affiliates with up to 25 percent of their business in securities underwriting (up from 10 percent)

By loosening the restrictions imposed by the Glass-Steagall act, banks like Citicorp and Chase go on an investment and merger spree.

Finally, after 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.

The innocuous sounding Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, also guts the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, which had set restrictions on banks, preventing bank holding companies owning two or more banks from engaging in non-banking activity and from buying banks in another state.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, "You're buying the government?"

With the barrier between banks and shady investments gone, they engaged in a buyout/merger spree that helped to fuel the dot.com boom/bust.

When that failed, they moved into real estate speculation.

To keep up with this financial feeding frenzy, the private banks of the ill-named Federal Reserve have been printing their brand of counterfeit money, 24/7, 365.

Between the inflated money supply, which is based on the governments word and banks playing fast and loose with their investments, we are now facing another Crash of '29 and another Great Depression.

It only seems like poetic justice that the U.S., the source of so much grief and so many wars in the world that have devasted other countries, is now going to be on the receiving end of that devastation.Guess one could take solace in the fact that when the roof falls in, it won't be from a "smart bomb" dropped from 15,000 feet, but a financial bomb, dropped from Wall Street.

I've heard Harvard and Yale and all the other "exclusive" schools described as Diploma Mills for the rich. It looks like they don't learn anything except how to screw over the little guy (since he's obviously not an alumn or a member of their special fraternity)

American businessman and politicians and any person who thinks what these people are doing is right have SUBPRIME morals. America's foreign policy is subprime and eventually the whole of America and its supporters will be subprime unless they start acting fairly when it comes to foreign policy and stop demonising the 'other'